Winston Sill/ Freelance Photographer
Rex Nettleford looks at a display at the Little Theatre covering aspects of the late Eric Coverley's life last Tuesday.The following is Professor Rex Nettleford's tribute to Eric Coverley at the Little Theatre last Tuesday.
I speak in tribute to Eric Coverley - draftsman, calligrapher, actor, impresario and friend to all who knew and understand the force and power of the creative imagination.
I speak on behalf of all who are generous of mind, heart and spirit and understand the significance that the creative arts have for life's meaning and national purpose.
He was to all who knew him well a great patriot of magnanimous spirit, with a strong belief in his compatriots and his country, a true Jamaican who could self-assert without rancour, a gentle giant, a man who could suffer fools gladly without being taken in by the congenital 'ginnalship' of his beloved colleagues, a man who would always give to the talented the benefit of the doubt, even in the face of the wildest claims to prima donnaship or superstardom.
How else could he have survived in the performing arts, to which he contributed seminally from his years as an actor in the 1930s through to his 'chalk-talk' virtuoso acts and the variety concerts he sponsored or co-sponsored on Christmas mornings?
He belonged to a generation which sustained the life of the ancestral Ward Theatre and nurtured the great talent of Variety Theatre for the three decades preceding Independence, giving to the Jamaican cultural landscape such theatrical icons as Abe and Cupes, Bim and Bam, Sarsaparilla, George Bowen, Lee Gordon, Ranny Williams, Harold Holness, George Carter, Bunny Neil and the young singing prodigy, Jimmy Tucker, among others.
Among those others was the great and enduring Louise Bennett, whom he had the good sense not only to engage for her first professional appearance, but also to marry and to provide her with the stability of love, caring, compassion and an unfaltering lasting friendship which all artistes need for survival and beyond. This particular gift to Jamaica can be so easily missed or taken for granted. But not by those of us who enjoyed the hospitality, laughter and joy of living of the two in that house in the hills of Gordon Town. His peaceful passing, as the Honourable Miss Lou kept stressing to me over the past week, may well have come from a quiet feeling on his part that his 91 years on this earth were by no means lived in vain.
He was so many other things to Jamaican theatre and the arts in general! In the early days of the Festival movement he was the great producer, designer and builder of floats for the annual processions to the Grand Gala at the stadium. Before and after Independence he rose to the informal, but much prized, position of official calligrapher to the nation. So many illuminated addresses, citations and certificates of merit adorned the offices, halls and homes of deserving awardees recognised by friendly societies, educational institutions and later the Norman Manley Foundation, which grants the annual Norman Manley Award for Excellence. A man for all seasons, as a friend of his described him, he played animateur for and friend to many a young talent, wherever he sensed the germ of genius or creative potential.
The National Dance Theatre Company, the Pantomime Company, what has now emerged into Jamaican choral theatre (his aunt Connie was, after all, an excellent contralto in the Jamaican Choral Society of old), the wide range of products from the arts showcase of the annual festival, the folk music renaissance from the Cudjoe Minstrels through the Frats Quintet to the post-Independence Jamaican Folksingers - they are all beneficiaries of the genuine love and caring Eric Coverley's generation brought to Jamaican arts and culture, the one field, if none other, that has had undiminished energy and has enjoyed undoubted success since 1962 in our still beleaguered nation but creatively well-endowed society.
At his passing, a friend in Canada wrote to me endorsing Henry Beecher's sentiments that we should open the alabaster boxes of our love to fill the lives of our friends with sweetness while they are still alive and that we should speak approving and cheering words while their ears can hear and their hearts be thrilled by them. Eric Coverley was not of that view; he was the sort of person who would make one feel that wherever he is now, he is certainly hearing the words of appreciation which have filled the newspaper columns here and in Toronto, written in tribute to him.
The late Dennis Scott, who knew 'Mass Eric' well enough and who in turn won the admiration of both Miss Lou and 'Coverley', as Ms. Lou endearingly called him, would have applied to Eric Coverley the words he wrote on the passing of another great Jamaican:
You measure a man by
the space that his going makes;
the air, now, is full of his absence;
the tent is still
.......................
The lights go down
Over the quiet arena
Over the sea and the hill;
The music descends to a funeral sorrow,
Silence each clown
But when the show begins again,
And the big drums beat,
And the grinning performers circle the ring
On their deceptive feet,
Remember the high road he walked, higher
Than the glitter or the glory of the show
How could he not rest in peace? He will, as long as we the beneficiaries of all he had to offer continue on the high road he walked to self-esteem, self-confidence and self-discoery through the arts.
